Thread: Case Colouring and Re-blueing

Anyone know where I can get a good job done on refinishing an old sxs?

Would like colour case if possible and barrels blued then find somewhere to refinish the stock

It would need to be a high quality shotgun to justify the expense. There are two ways to colour case harden, the prepared parts in a muffle box full of charred bone and leather and heated to red heat in a forge before opening and dumping in cold water (the traditional method), or the cyanide process which is done by a few heat-treating companies in NZ. The barrels usually have to be blued by the long rusting process as modern hot-dip nitrate blueing attacks the solder that holds the barrels together. Then there is the stock refinishing. You won't have any change out of a thousand dollars, possibly more, and at the end of the exercise you have a refinished gun which is not worth as much as a gun with some original finish. A finish-worn Purdey or Holland & Holland in excellent mechanical order would be worth it, but not much else.

I can do a rust blue for you an it wont cost the crown jewels to to have the barrels done

Originally Posted by Chop3r

I can do a rust blue for you an it wont cost the crown jewels to to have the barrels done

The action doesn’t have to be case coloured but that was what I kinda hoped. That being the case are you able to blue the action and barrels?

Originally Posted by Uplander

The action doesn’t have to be case coloured but that was what I kinda hoped. That being the case are you able to blue the action and barrels?

Yep

Originally Posted by Chop3r

I can do a rust blue for you an it wont cost the crown jewels to to have the barrels done

With "rust blue" do you mean traditional browning like this example?

No. If you were to boil the steel in a tank the colour changes from rust colour to a blue colour and that is the rust blue. It s a longer process than browning

Originally Posted by Chop3r

No. If you were to boil the steel in a tank the colour changes from rust colour to a blue colour and that is the rust blue. It s a longer process than browning

OK, so the same kind of black iron oxide coating as on "black" steel pipes? You just helped me make sense of something told me by someone over 30 years ago -- about stopping a piece of steel from rusting by boiling it. At the time I just filed it away thinking "OK, interesting".